


take root, take flight

by carafin



Category: Carol (2015)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 22:23:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5802379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carafin/pseuds/carafin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rindy Aird, growing up.</p><blockquote>
  <p>Every morning, Rindy finds herself peering critically at her reflection in the mirror, as if searching for something. The soft curve of her mother’s lips, perhaps. The sharp of her cheekbones. Under the morning light her mother’s golden curls might glow a soft orange, but Rindy’s hair has always remained an unimpressive shade of dirty blonde. ‘You look like her around the eyes,’ is what Aunt Therese tells her. Some days Rindy believes her; other days she thinks it is nothing more than a trick of the light.</p>
  <p>But a woman who gave up her life of dazzling normalcy and chose, instead, to be unutterably herself -- such a woman would have more to show than just, say, full lips and sharp cheekbones. And it is her silent courage and quiet self-possession that Rindy wants, above all else, to emulate.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	take root, take flight

Rindy’s earliest and fondest memories of her childhood consist: sitting atop her mother’s lap at the dressing table; her mother’s fingers running through her mop of gloriously messy curls, each motion slow and impossibly tender; morning light spilling in through gaps in the curtains, casting a dim orange glow onto the wooden furniture, a beautiful play of colours and shadows and light.

Growing up in the Aird household, Rindy’s childhood has never lacked for much: her collection of toys is extensive, if not extravagant, there are always parties to attend, and her dresses have always inspired envy among her friends. Despite it all, it is these moments with her mother, at the dressing table, drenched in sunlight, that Rindy will always hold the most dearly to her heart.

Of course, some of these memories are better than the rest. On good days her mother is quick to laugh, and when she smiles the soft curve of her mouth is deeper, more genuine. On bad days -- and it is not until many, many years later that Rindy will come to realise the reason behind these bad days, and the extent of her mother’s struggles -- her smile never quite reaches her eyes, and her laughter, although genuine, is also subdued and brittle.

And even then -- even at on her worst days, Rindy’s mother is still beautiful, quite possibly the most beautiful person in the world. Rindy buries her face in her mother’s chest, and inhales the familiar scent perfume. Her mother’s embrace warm, as always. It feels familiar and comforting; it feels like enough.

 

 

And if Rindy, thirteen, still counts to a hundred when she brushes her hair every morning, the numbers tumbling from her lips like a quiet prayer -- nobody, not even her mother, has to know.

 

 

The apartment her mother shares with Aunt Therese is small and sparsely furnished, but it is also warm and cosy in a way the Aird residence will never be, not that Rindy can explain why. What Rindy can say with confidence is this: the most striking and attractive feature of the apartment is neither the stylish wallpaper, nor the tasteful furniture, but the rows and rows of photographs displayed on the walls; pictures of the streets and the skies and scenery and buildings. All of them belong to Aunt Therese, but it’s her mother who took the time to frame them up and arrange them in place with great care. For some reason, Aunt Therese doesn’t seem to be too fond of taking pictures of people; there’s just one photograph of her mother on the nightstand in the master bedroom, a candid shot of her in the snow.

‘You like it?’ Aunt Therese asks, smiling, when she catches Rindy staring at it one day.

‘I think this is the most beautiful thing in the world,’ Rindy says, because it’s true. Aunt Therese only laughs in response. For Christmas that year, Aunt Therese gives Rindy a collection of photos she’d secretly taken of Rindy and her mother: the two of them, hunched over a puzzle on the floor; seated at the piano, playing a song; laughing at the dinner table. It’s tough, but Rindy picks a few she likes the most and puts them on her dressing table, next to her comb. She tries very hard to ignore the look on her father’s face whenever he walks by and sees them.

(Rindy’s favourite picture, however, will always be the one in the master bedroom, the one of her mother in the snow. She thinks she could spend hours, days, just looking at it; a photo like that, it could only have been taken by someone in love.)

 

 

A List of Things Rindy Must Never Mention at Mealtimes, By No Means Exhaustive: Aunt Abby, Aunt Therese, therapists, divorces, lawsuits and, quite inexplicably, amateur photographers. Rindy loves her father dearly, and is rather fond of her grandparents, but the fact is that dinner conversation in the Aird household remains a tiresome affair governed by esoteric rules, the breaking of which will often result in pinched lips, furrowed brows, and excruciating silences.

Some topics are even more taboo than the others.

It starts when Rindy comes across the headlines of the morning newspaper that’s been placed on the dining table: “Ratings Take a Plunge after Senatorial Candidate Discovered to be Gay”. Her frown must’ve carried through breakfast, because her father looks up from his scrambled eggs and says, ‘Is there something bothering you, honey? You look upset.’

‘What’s so bad about a man loving a man, daddy? Or a woman loving a woman?’

The silence that ensues is so stifling, Rindy could choke on it. Wrong place, wrong question.

‘It’s _immoral_ ,’ her father says eventually, in a bitter, half-strangled voice, and goes back to his scrambled eggs without another word. Across the table, grandma and grandpa look scandalised in a way that suggests that Rindy might well have taken off all her clothes and pranced naked on the lawn. Rindy does not press on for an explanation; by now, she knows that she will not get any. Rindy grabs her coffee mug with trembling hands, takes a long swig, and swallows her anger down with bitter, bitter coffee.

Rindy thinks about her mother and Aunt Therese, about their little flat on Madison Avenue, about the photo of her mother on the nightstand. She thinks about her mother’s laughter -- shy, almost schoolgirl-like in its earnestness -- whenever Aunt Therese tries to take a picture of her, the way Aunt Therese studies her from the other side of the camera, rapt and intense and unblinking, a reminder that love is a choice as much as it isn’t.

A love as true and unfettered as theirs -- there is nothing immoral about a love like that.

 

 

Where mealtimes at the Aird household is a stifling affair involving unspoken reprimands and layers upon layers of subtexts which Rindy have learned better than to dissect or comprehend, dinner conversations over at her mother’s are lively, joyful, and devoid of any pretence. That Aunt Therese works for a newspaper company _and_ is ridiculously well read means that they never seem to run out of strange and wonderful topics for discussion; her mother is a wealth of ludicrous anecdotes, courtesy of her clients at work or acquaintances at one dinner party or another; Rindy, for the most part, sits and listens contentedly, although she does throw in a comment or two once in a while.

The truth is that her mother is never quite at ease as when she is around Aunt Therese. Of course -- her mother has always been a woman of impeccable poise, something that doesn’t and will never change regardless of the company she’s in. But the way she is quick to throw back her head and bubble with genuine laughter, quick to offer a witty retort or another, is not lost on Rindy. And sometimes, when her mother reaches out to put her hand on Aunt Therese’s, or when Aunt Therese leans in to sniff at the new perfume along the curves of her mother’s neck, Rindy will feel a strange urge to turn away.

It would be ridiculously easy, Rindy thinks, to be jealous of a love like this. But Aunt Therese, for all her strangeness, is genuine and kind in her own way, and Rindy -- Rindy has ten-year-old memories of a woman whose unhappiness clung onto her like a sickening cloud of perfume, a woman who quietly and resignedly traded her vivaciousness for her reticence, who was unnaturally quick to reach for the cigarettes in her purse and wine bottles in the fridge. For this reason Rindy doesn’t feel a single shred of loathing towards Aunt Therese, she cannot bring herself to feel anything but gratefulness.

 

 

Growing up, remarks pertaining to Rindy’s appearance typically opened with an exclamation of her beauty, followed swiftly by -- depending on the company she was in -- ‘you look so much like your father’ or ‘you’re a splitting image of your mother’. As news of her mother’s circumstances made its way through the circles of New York’s upper classes, comments tended, more often than not, to the former.

Every morning, Rindy finds herself peering critically at her reflection in the mirror, as if searching for something. The soft curve of her mother’s lips, perhaps. The sharp of her cheekbones. Under the morning light her mother’s golden curls might glow a soft orange, but Rindy’s hair has always remained an unimpressive shade of dirty blonde. ‘You look like her around the eyes,’ is what Aunt Therese tells her. Some days Rindy believes her; other days she thinks it is nothing more than a trick of the light.

But a woman who gave up her life of dazzling normalcy and chose, instead, to be unutterably herself -- such a woman would have more to show than just, say, full lips and sharp cheekbones. And it is her silent courage and quiet self-possession that Rindy wants, above all else, to emulate.

 

 

When Rindy, eighteen, returns home with a letter from her country’s most prestigious college informing her of her acceptance to their engineering course in lieu of a prospective husband-to-be, thereby causing a protracted and not-unimpressive uproar in the Aird household -- well, no one’s to say she didn’t inherit _that_ from her mother.

 

 

Rindy spends the next few years juggling two jobs, a massive loan, and college. She rejects her mother’s and Aunt Therese’s offers to pay for her tuition: partly out of thoughtfulness, but also because there is a point she has to make. Rindy has it all planned out: she’ll graduate by twenty-three, join a research laboratory, work her way up the ladder for a few years of experience, and then quit her job by the time she’s thirty to join NASA. Aunt Therese may be a girl flung from space, but Rindy’s aspirations stretch even further than the stars.

All of this is a tall order, of course, for a girl of eighteen living in a country and an era where a woman’s life is not her own but an extension of her husband’s. And yet: in the streets there are hundreds and thousands of women marching tirelessly for their rights to be doctors, lawyers, engineers. Aunt Therese, thirty-eight and very much female, is listed amongst their country’s most famous photographers -- every other day Rindy will see her name stamped on New York’s most influential newspaper, and feel a surge of quiet pride. Her mother is a woman who, at the age of thirty-three, burned almost all her bridges, her white picket fence, in favour of loving another woman. She never once looked back. And in all this Rindy hears only one message: _you can be anything._

It’s a tall order, perhaps. It’s ridiculous and unheard of and borders impossible, but Rindy’s _ready_ to achieve the impossible. All her life, she has never known anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> [inspiration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_\(scientist\)) for rindy's vocation; the penultimate paragraph was written with the backdrop of america's 1960s-70s feminist movement in mind.
> 
> also on [tumblr](http://carafinn.tumblr.com/post/137935872597/girl-soaring-carol-2015).


End file.
